]]>Business model innovations have been crucial for the solar industry in recent years. Community solar — where people can buy into community and neighborhood solar panel projects — has emerged, as has crowdfunding, where people can buy into solar projects and make back money (or a return) on them.

Now a young startup from Boston called CloudSolar is taking a spin on these two concepts with a plan to build a solar panel farm and enable people to buy individual panels (or even parts of panels) of the farm through crowdfunding, no matter where they live. The group launched an Indiegogo campaign on Wednesday morning to test out the idea and raise money (a $300,000 goal) to build their first solar farm.

As the name suggests, the team is making the analogy with cloud computing and the practice of remotely accessing data and computing over a network. In that way, anyone who buys panels in CloudSolar’s farm can remotely view how much power the farm and their panel(s) are producing and how many carbon emissions are being offset, via a cell phone.

However, that basic analogy with cloud computing starts to break down beyond the name and the mobile monitoring. Owners of panels don’t actually tap into their solar energy (the way you would with a cloud-stored song or AWS computing), and the electricity from the farm is planned to be sold locally to power companies in the region.

In the solar world this remote practice isn’t all that unusual, and some large companies, like Apple, are taking this approach for some of their solar farms. In North Carolina, Apple sells the energy from its solar farms (two of which are miles from its data center there) to Duke Energy to put back onto the grid; Apple counts its data center in North Carolina (legitimately) as solar-powered.

The Topaz solar farm.

The CloudSolar team says its first farm is planned for “the Northeast,” and if everything works as planned, other sites could be built in California, too. If they can raise their funds, the group says they’ll build the first solar farm next year.

Now that solar panels are at their cheapest time in history, business models — not necessarily technology — are crucial for the industry. The solar-as-a-service business model — which emerged in recent years pioneered by SunEdison and expanded by SolarCity — now dominates the residential solar industry in the U.S., enabling customers to pay for solar power in monthly increments over decades, instead of paying for the expensive upfront fee of installing the panels. This innovation has opened the door for solar for tens of thousands of home owners in the U.S.

Crowdfunding for solar, while still a very (very) small part of solar project financing, has inspired a wave of new democratized funding models from startups for solar. Because solar systems steadily generate energy over 30 or so years and that power is sold to someone (a homeowner or a power company), investors (and regular people) can invest money into installing a solar project and then can make back a small return on the energy sales each month. Startup Solar Mosaic has gotten a lot of attention for its solar crowdfunding platform.

Then there’s the more charitable-oriented solar project startups like SunFunder, which crowdfunds solar projects in developing off-grid communities where solar power can change lives like Tanzania and Uganda. Like with Solar Mosaic, someone who invests in SunFunder can earn back their money, but making money probably isn’t your main motivation for participating in SunFunder’s campaigns.

CloudSolar’s idea is an interesting tweak on all of these models: community, solar-as-a-service and crowdfunding. But beyond the early adopter market who likes trying out new things on Indiegogo and Kickstarter, I’m not exactly sure what the motivation will be for people to buy into a remote solar farm.

Since the solar farm is probably no where near the panel owner, the motivation of helping your direct neighborhood or community probably won’t be there (though, perhaps CloudSolar could create more of a virtual community). Because the solar panel(s) will be owned by you, there’s not really much of a charitable aspect involved.

The Topaz solar panel farm, that uses First Solar panels in CA.

And the money making capabilities at a small scale are pretty basic. For $250, you can buy a quarter of a 250 watt panel (about 62.5 watts), and over 25 years you’ll make back $562, in payments every three months; a half panel is $450 (125 watts) and you’ll make $1,125 over 25 years; an entire panel is being offered for $650 to $750 and over 25 years you’ll make $2,250.

Obviously, the more money you put in, the greater your return. There’s an option to own 15 solar panels for $9,000, and two out of the nine spots for that have already been taken. I could see investors that are clean energy fans opting for these options, but probably not the average person. CloudSolar makes money by taking 20 percent of the money generated from the solar power.

One of the more clear motivating factors for someone to participate in this is, frankly, guilt — or put in a nicer way, someone who is looking to offset their own grid energy or gasoline usage. Offsets are a little controversial because they’re always so complicated.

If you buy one solar panel it would offset the use of your iPhone for forever, or your laptop for over a decade, or driving thousands of miles in a Tesla car. But when it comes to offsetting the energy used by an average house? One panel only offsets the energy used by an average home by about seven months. So, unlike if you had solar panels on your roof or you bought into a community solar program through your utility, one panel isn’t gonna cover you.

]]>By the end of 2014, solar installer and financier (and soon to be solar panel manufacturer) SolarCity had installed about 1 GW worth of solar panels cumulatively on the rooftops of commercial and residential buildings. For comparison’s sake, that’s like the total of a really large coal or natural gas plant, but scattered across tens of thousands of rooftops. But SolarCity confirmed in its fourth quarter and year-long earnings Wednesday that it will install another gigawatt of solar panels in 2015 — basically doubling its entire amount this year.

The dramatic growth can be seen not only in SolarCity’s growing revenues, but also in its losses. For 2014, SolarCity generated revenue of $255.03 million, up substantially from its 2013 revenue of $163.84 million. But losses also widened significantly as well, and SolarCity posted a loss of $375.23 million in 2014, which was much larger than its loss in 2013 of $151.76 million.

SolarCity panels, image courtesy of SolarCity.

From Wall Street’s perspective, SolarCity posted a wider-than-expected loss in the fourth quarter of this year of $141.14 million, from a Q4 2013 loss of $64.54 million. SolarCity’s stock dropped more than five percent on the earnings news.

To sustain its growth in this highly competitive market, the company is investing heavily in sales and marketing (close to $80 million in the fourth quarter of 2014 and $239 million for the year). The company is also investing in lowering its costs down the road, through its recent acquisition of Silevo and R&D into lowering the costs of its solar systems.

The good news is that SolarCity’s growth strategy is working to grab market share. The company, which is only eight years old, said it has the largest amount of solar customers among its competitors (190,000 by the end of 2014). It has a goal to have 1 million customers by 2018. SolarCity has long been strong on selling solar panels to residential customers, and the company grew its residential solar panel deployments by 110 percent from the previous year.

SolarCity factory in upstate New York.

The bad news last year, beyond the continuing losses, was that SolarCity had some delays in projects with its commercial customers, leading to less commercial projects deployed. Also, naturally, SolarCity and its solar energy generation don’t perform as well in the darker winter months.

One of the interesting newer initiatives from SolarCity is its acquisition of Silevo and its plan to build its own solar panels in a factory in upstate New York. Being a vertically integrated solar company can help SolarCity cut costs and control its supply chain.

The company said on the earnings call that its factory in New York will be ready by the first quarter of 2016. “The foundation has been poured and erection of the steel structure is expected to begin over the next few weeks,” the company wrote in its shareholder letter.

]]>A decade ago the sprawling artist compound just off of Ashby Avenue in an industrial part of West Berkeley, Calif, was filled with flame-throwing robots, stacks of shipping containers and towering Burning Man-inspired sculptures. During my college years at the University of California, Berkeley, and for several years afterwards, the place — then called The Shipyard — was the stuff of legend, hosting shows where huge metal art machines battled each other, and organizing events titled things like How to Destroy the Universe Festival.

Today it’s the headquarters of All Power Labs, an energy startup that emerged out of the ashes of the collective as a way for engineer artist, and all-around-noncomformist Jim Mason to provide power for the compound after the city of Berkeley repeatedly turned off their electricity. “The city was not excited about our interpretation of the building code,” Mason recalled of the group’s offgrid beginnings last week during an interview in All Power Lab’s offices, which sit just above their open machining and fabrication workshops.

Co-founder and CEO Jim Mason, and Director of Infrastructure, Nick Bindbeutel, [L,R] stand in front of the Power Pallet, at the headquarters of All Power Labs, in Berkeley, Calif. Dog and mascot Dulie in the foreground.

Instead of art machines, the place now produces machines that make distributed clean energy and are mostly shipped to the developing world. Over the past seven years, the group has been building devices called gasifiers that take plant waste (like walnut shells and wood chips) and turn it into electricity with a byproduct of biochar. It’s decades old technology — which was popular during World War II and is still used on a large industrial scale today — but Mason’s vision was to shrink down the tech to a personal scale, not just to run The Shipyard off the grid, but also to make it available to anyone who wanted to make it or buy it.

Now after years of refining the systems, All Power Labs has shipped 500 products and employs 40 workers. The team — a combination of junkyard fabricators, university-trained engineers and solar industry execs — has been gaining momentum, transitioning from their early DIY days into what they hope is a stable and predictable product-oriented energy company.

The group reportedly generates upwards of five million dollars in revenue a year, has been awarded several recent patents around core technology, and last month won a $2 million grant from the California Energy Commission to build out a large gasifier in a shipping container that can turn the waste from fire-prevention forest thinning in the Sierra Nevada mountains into usable, on-demand, local electricity. The award still needs to be officially voted on and approved by the CEC.

This week the team officially brought on Cal-Berkeley energy expert Dan Kammen as a founding board member. Kamen described All Power Labs’ products to me as “very exciting as a technology and a systems solution.” While All Power Labs has long operated off of sales to support its growth, the company is now looking to take advantage of this recent momentum to raise funding to scale up and keeping refining its products.

All Power Labs’ latest large gasifier fits in a shipping container, and provides over 100 kW of power from plant waste. The company is using a grant from the CEC to finish development work on it.

A backwards evolution

It’s taken a good seven years for the team to get to where they are today. “This wasn’t the plan,” explains Mason, who has a degree in anthropology from Stanford, the mind of a mechanical engineer, a background working in open source online communities and the spirit of a Berkeley radical. All Power Lab’s Director of Strategic Intiatives, Tom Price — who has been an environmental manager at Burning Man and spent years working on community solar projects — describes the company’s evolution as “completely backwards.”

In the traditional Silicon Valley tech startup world, co-founders might build a prototype or a basic app and then start raising money from investors to build out and launch the product. In contrast All Power Labs has been entirely bootstrapped, and slowly meandered around to their current commercialization strategy. Their development has been as organic as the produce being sold across the street at the health food coop Berkeley Bowl.

Originally, Mason’s idea was to take the open source, participatory, and collaborative culture that they’d fostered in the art collective and at Burning Man, and bring it to energy. Mason looked to the personalized, layered, and meaning-filled relationships that humans have developed around resources like food and transportation in modern times (picture all the foodie movements and hot rod culture) and wondered if the same type of relationship could be fostered around energy generation and use.

An All Power Labs’ gasifier being run in Liberia.

Soon after the city shut off their power, Mason started reading about gasifiers via an old Swedish gasifier manual; Sweden has long been a world leader when it comes to converting waste into energy. Gasifiers use heat to transform plant waste into a gas similar to natural gas that can be used to run an engine and produce electricity. A basic gasifier is about as complex as a traditional wooden stove and can be assembled with simple tools like a hammer and wrench.

Gasifiers are also interesting from an environmental, and emissions perspective, because they can produce “carbon negative” energy. Plants and trees harvest carbon from the atmosphere, and when they are later put into a gasifier as waste, the remaining energy is extracted and the leftover byproduct is the carbon-based biochar, which can go back into the soil. As Price said, “Solar is great, but we need to harvest gigatons of carbon from the sky.”

The by-product of the gasifiers is that they produce biochar, which can be added to soil as a fertilizer.

In the early days, and partly to cultivate the personal energy experience, All Power Labs made kits called Gasifier Experimenter Kits (GEKs), which were free CAD files that walked users through the steps of making the gasifiers from off the shelf parts. While the kits received a lot of attention from enthusiasts (many in the U.S.), even the early adopters sometimes found the notoriously tempermental tech difficult to get up and running and operating for substantial periods of time.

Over the course of several years, the team slowly decided they wanted to provide a product that was much easier for their customers to use, instead of just providing them the means to create the technology. All Power Labs also started to get an increasing amount of interest from local entrepreneurs in developing areas in Africa and Asia that needed low cost, off-grid power to run their businesses, had access to abundant biomass (many operated in agriculture regions) and wanted to replace their expensive and dirty diesel generators with something else.

Tom Price, Director of Strategic Initiatives at All Power Labs, stands next to the Power Cube, a mobile gasifier.

All Power Labs no longer sells these kits and the tech has evolved into the company’s three current gasifier products. The first is the company’s staple, the Power Pallet, which produces 15 kW to 18 kW of power, fits in the bed of a truck, costs $30,000 or $1.50 per watt, and represents the bulk of the shipments.

All Power Labs now has Power Pallets operating in 40 countries, including in Liberia using old rubber trees, the Philippines using coconut shells, and in Haiti, gasifying corn cobs. They had to temporarily halt their on-the-ground work in Liberia when Ebola hit.

At that $1.50 per watt price point, a customer that buys a Power Pallet to replace a generator and diesel fuel can recover their costs in 15 months, Price said. That price also significantly beats the cost to install solar panels, which can cost $2.27 a watt for large rooftop solar systems for companies and organizations, and $3.60 a watt for residential systems, according to GTM Research. And unlike a solar panel, the Power Pallet can run around the clock, whenever it’s got plant waste to gasify.

All Power Labs works out of a 11,000 square foot former artist collective space, in Berkeley, Calif., filled with shipping containers. Dog Dulie wanders around the space.

All Power Systems has two other products in the works. There’s the Power Cube, a regulation compliant version of the Power Pallet for the European market that is just starting to go into production. And there’s the Powertainer, which is the larger, 100 kW unit that the company is working on with the CEC grant, and which isn’t yet on sale publicly (they’re shooting for 2016).

Despite the fact that the tech is centuries old, All Power Labs is still able to claim at least three patents for new gasifier innovations. Price said that they’re also using state of the art materials like cast in place ceramics in the reactor, and the electronic brain of the systems — which use Arduino sensors — are utilizing the latest in electronics, helping the gasifiers bypass many of the messy problems that plague older systems.

Gasifiers, in general, are messy systems, and produce tar, a dirty pollutant. They also can be very temperamental, which is one of the reasons why the technology hasn’t taken off on a broader scale. In addition to those two hurdles, the lifetime of the systems are dependent on how often the owner runs them; the basic four cylinder engine in the Power Pallet might need to be replaced after two years.

What’s next?

While All Power Labs has been commercially operating for years, it hasn’t fully transitioned into a streamlined business with automated manufacturing or some of the typical operating metrics that guide larger production companies. In the energy generation world, technology needs to be predictable and repeatable. Variation in products should be minute. And the more reliable the products are out of the gate, the less time the All Power Labs engineers need to spend in the field fixing them.

That’s one reason the company is looking to raise a Series A round of $10 million, so it can continue to “productize” the technology. It has also brought in some more experienced management in recent years: COO Alejandro Abalos joined the company two and a half years ago after spending a combined decade at solar companies GreenVolts, SunPower and PowerLight. Price also joined close to two years ago, too. Clearly they’re excited about the potential, even after having worked in the newly booming industry of solar.

A Power Pallet operating in Uganda.

It could be difficult for All Power Labs to raise funds from traditional venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Many of the larger firms that were once aggressive on cleantech have now moved away from new investments. The firms that are continuing to invest in energy now tend to take a lighter approach, opting to support digital energy focused startups that might require less capital to scale.

But there’s a growing amount of money being invested in clean energy in general in the world (much of it in solar projects and offshore wind), and there’s still some money for equity in early stage technology, though much of it is coming from outside the Valley. Corporations, like Shell, Siemens and GE, are looking to make energy investments as part of their corporate R&D strategy. And more family offices are willing to support energy startups that have a triple bottom line.

Altaeros’ high altitude wind turbine, which Softbank invested in.

Some of the deeper investor pockets can be found in Asia. For example, telecom giant Softbank has a new fund to invest in early energy generation and storage technologies that can be implemented in Japan and Asia. Japan is struggling to remake its energy generation mix after the nuclear disaster.

And there’s still some funding in the Valley for big energy ideas. Cleantech heavyweights Nancy Pfund and Ira Ehrenpreis have teamed up at DBL Investors for a new fund. Groups like Other Lab and M37 are testing out new models around developing energy innovation that are part government lab, part corporate lab and part Valley incubator. And perhaps the few VC-backed energy companies that have done well, like Tesla and SolarCity, will help produce the next-generation of entrepreneurial energy investors willing to make bigger, and smarter, risks in new energy startups.

I do wonder how the team at All Power Labs would feel at the end of the day about joining up with the sometimes slick, and always-optimizing, investors of Silicon Valley, or even investors outside the Valley. It would help them reach another of level of efficiency and growth, but it could also mean giving up some of their core tenets and lifestyle.

But whatever happens to the group going forward, they have the enthusiasm, momentum, and innovative thinking rarely seen in such an organically-emerging startup. And if their gasifiers are ever able to reach any substantial scale, they could have a profound effect on the emergence of off-grid power in the places that need it most.

Large utility-scale solar panel farms use rows and rows of solar panels to directly convert the sun’s energy into electricity. Solar thermal farms, on the other hand, uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat liquid that produces steam and makes electricity from a turbine. These sites are essentially using the heat of the sun to produce electricity.

Abengoa’s solar thermal farm Mojave Solar

Spanish power giant Abengoa celebrated the opening last Friday of a huge 280 MW solar thermal farm called Mojave Solar, built just outside of Barstow, California. The project can provide enough solar power for 90,000 homes in California, and was built across 2 square miles.

Abengoa said the site will generate $169 million in tax revenue over 25 years, provided a peak of 2,200 construction jobs, and now employs about 70 people. California utility PG&E is buying the power from Mojave Solar, and the facility will help PG&E meet California’s state mandate to generate a third of its electricity from clean power by 2020.

Abengoa finished another 280 MW solar thermal farm in Gila Bend, Arizona at the end of 2013. Years ago, power companies were as bullish on solar thermal farms as they were on solar panel farms, which are increasingly being constructed in the deserts of California, Nevada and Arizona.

The Topaz solar farm, built by MidAmerican, outside of San Luis Obispo

But a few years ago the price of solar panels began to drop dramatically, from an average installation cost of $5.79 per watt in 2010, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, to $2.71 per watt in the third quarter of 2014 (this is the average cost blended across all types of installations). Utility-scale solar panel installations can be as low as $1.68 per watt according to GTM Research.

As a result, some power companies that had solar thermal farms planned converted these sites over to solar panel facilities. Other companies that had developed businesses off of developing solar thermal sites cancelled projects in the U.S. that were no longer deemed economical and focused internationally.

A look at the heliostats and 2 of the 3 towers of Ivanpah. Taken from the 6th floor of the Unit 1 tower.

But ultra cheap solar panels are only part of the headwinds facing large utility-scale solar thermal farms in the U.S. There’s also a couple of important incentives that have been changed as well.

First off, the federal investment tax credit (ITC), which delivers a 30 percent tax credit to solar project developers, is planned to be cut to 10 percent by the end of 2016. While it could be extended, the uncertainty is threatening the construction of utility scale solar farms, using both solar thermal and solar panels. The New York Times noted in an article this weekend that there are no future large solar thermal projects planned in the U.S.

Then there’s the fact that federal incentives in the form of loan guarantees are also no longer widely available for solar thermal plants. When Ivanpah was built, it used a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. government to construct its 347,000 mirrors and three huge 450-foot towers. Likewise, Abengoa’s Mojave Solar used a $1.2 billion loan guarantee to finance construction. These types of large loans are no longer regularly coming out of the Department of Energy.

While large solar panel farms are still low cost enough that they could continue to be constructed, solar thermal farms the size of Ivanpah (392 MW, 5 square miles), Mojave Solar (280 MW, 2 square miles), and Solana (280 MW, 3 square miles) are far less likely to get built in the future. (Though, solar panel projects will also be impacted by the reduction of the ITC.)

Utilities calculate how much clean power they need (most likely to meet a state mandate) and then compare it to the cost of building a new natural gas plant, a wind farm or either type of solar farm. If natural gas plants, or other types of clean power, are cheaper than solar thermal facilities, then it’s an easy decision.

But large solar thermal farms could still find life outside of the U.S. They can uniquely store thermal energy at night, providing electricity far longer than solar panel farms without energy storage can.

BrightSource, which is the startup behind the Ivanpah site, recently announced a joint venture with China’s Shanghai Electric Group to build utility-scale solar thermal plants in China. Their first proposed project is to build two 135 MW solar thermal projects in the Qinghai province of China.

]]>Every night, nearly a hundred robots come to life in the arid desert of southern Israel and get busy cleaning rows and rows of solar panels.

The robots are designed by startup Ecoppia as an alternative to the conventional, but also labor-intensive, method of sending human workers to hose and wipe down panels manually or use a truck-mounted sprayer to do so.

Dirty panels produce less electricity, but the need to use water for cleaning those panels, especially in dry regions, makes even a clean power project less eco-friendly. And in certain remote corners, water extracted from the ground is too brackish for use without being treated, which adds to the production cost of a solar power plant.

In dusty areas such as the Middle East and India, solar panels could lose electricity production by 10 percent to 35 percent over time if they remain unwashed, Eran Meller, CEO of Ecoppia, told me in a recent interview.

Ecoppia’s robots dry clean each panel and move from the top to the bottom of a row of panels. The Israeli startup found a loyal customer in Arava Power, with which Ecoppia installed the first set of its robots on a solar farms (5 MW total) earlier this year in the Negev desert. Ecoppia is installing more robots in other Arava projects.

“It doesn’t pay to manually clean thousands of panels in hundreds of acres of arid desert fields,” said Jon Cohen, Arava’s CEO. “Now we have a process that costs less, and above that we are upping the output.” Using the robots so far has led to about 2-3 percent more electricity production than employing humans, Cohen said.

The challenge of keeping solar panels dust free will grow as more solar power projects are built worldwide. In many cases, cheap labor and ample water supply will continue to make manual washing the low-cost choice for solar power plant owners.

But for companies with projects in different climates — and the need to show they run a low-carbon, sustainable operation to secure permits or dodge lawsuits from environmental groups — a less energy intensive cleaning process could be desirable.

SunPower, which builds solar power projects around the world, bought Greenbotics a year ago after trying out the California startup’s technology in a solar farm it built in the state’s Central Valley. The big selling point of Greenbotics is that its technology uses up to 90 percent less water than manual cleaning.

Ecoppia was founded in January 2013 but started its development work a few quarters before that. The company has raised an undisclosed amount from the Swarth Group, GlenRock and Gandyr.

Each robot, which weighs about 86 kilograms (190 pounds), is essentially two large microfiber brushes on eight wheels, with the brushes rotating at a high speed to generate airflow as they move down the panel.

The airflow removes a bulk of the dust while the brushes get rid of the rest. The robot runs on two 12-volt lead-acid batteries at night. Solar electricity recharges the batteries during the day. After the robot completes its task, it returns to a docking station and uses the rotational energy to get rid of the dust captured by the microfiber.

Ecoppia has designed its robotic system to perform optimally in a row of solar panels that runs 300 meters by 6 meters (984 feet by 20 feet), Meller said. Each robot can take care of hundreds of panels each night, depending on the size and configuration of the installation. Power plant operators can control the robots remotely and receive data about the machines’ performance and maintenance needs.

Ecoppia makes money by selling and installing the robots and providing maintenance and data analytics. The cost to hire Ecoppia to engineer and install its robots runs from $0.03 to $0.06 per watt, Meller said.

With about one year of field data of its robots’ performance, the startup projects that its equipment and services could save 840 million liters of water for a 300 MW solar park over 20 years while increasing electricity sales by $180 million, Meller said. Of course, those projected savings and revenues will vary widely in different countries or even within a country, depending on the local operational costs and how much the utilities are willing to pay for power. Arava, for example, is cleaning its solar panels nightly in Israel while in California, SunPower is cleaning its panels several times a year.

Currently, Ecoppia’s robots are cleaning about 500,000 panels per month. It will be installing robots for other Arava projects, including 40 megawatts that have yet to be completed, that will bring the monthly total to 10 million by the end of 2015, Meller said. The robotics developers are working on entering the U.S. market next year.

Arava has been working closely with Ecoppia in engineering the robots to fit its projects’ configurations. Arava also secured written assurances from the manufactures of the panels it uses — Suntech Power, JA Solar and Trina Solar — that outfitting the robotic systems on their panels won’t change their warranties.

Ecoppia is working on engineering its robots to work on solar panels that are held up by trackers, which tilt the solar panels to follow the sun’s movement, said Cohen, who is looking at using trackers for future projects.

The close relationship with Ecoppia makes Arava a potential buyer of the robotic startup down the road. But Cohen would only allow that the his company is “closely affiliated with Ecoppia. We will be involved in Ecoppia going forward.”

]]>The solar industry is in expansion mode, again. First Solar — the U.S. maker of thin solar panels, which is seen as a bellwether for the industry — said this week that they plan to boost their solar panel production by as much as 46 percent in 2015.

SolarCity, the solar installer founded by Elon Musk’s cousins the Rive brothers, is building its first solar panel factory in New York and expects to roughly double the amount of solar installations to between 920MW to 1,000MW in 2015, company executives said this week during a call with analysts to discuss its third-quarter earnings.

Seems like the boom is back! Or is it?

For those who follow the solar market, that decision by First Solar is remarkable. It was only two years ago that the company — and the rest of the solar industry — struggled to deal with a growing global market that produced way more solar panels than it needed.

Arizona-based First Solar is looking at building new, and restarting or improving existing production lines, in 2015 because it expects more business in the next two years, said First Solar CEO, Jim Hughes, while discussing the company’s third-quarter earnings with analysts. The company also develops power projects and is building hundreds of megawatts worth of solar farms in California alone.

The growth will not only come from First Solar’s foray into markets outside of the U.S. but also the within their home turf, where the end of a 30 percent federal investment tax credit at the end of 2016 is prompting solar project builders try to beat that deadline.

The investment tax credit has driven much of the solar market growth in the U.S. Power project investors, including homeowners who purchase instead of lease their solar panels, could take 30 percent of the cost of a project off their income taxes. That tax credit is set to disappear after Dec. 31, 2016 for homeowners and drop to 10 percent for other types of projects.

The U.S. market has been among the top three big-growth markets worldwide. Solar panel installations in the country will likely grow 36 percent to reach 6.5 gigawatts in 2014, said GTM Research.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, a grade group, is gearing up for a big campaign to get Congress to extend the tax credit. With Republicans retaking control of the Senate and retaining its majority status in the House, solar companies might face a tougher lobbying effort ahead.

Without a clear signal from lawmakers that the tax credit as it exists will live beyond 2016, developers and investors understandably would feel the pressure to hurry up and get their projects done or at least underway in order to qualify to claim the credit. The same rush-rush mentality has happened many times before in the U.S. and in previously hot solar markets such as Spain and Italy (as well as in the wind industry over the years).

The potential loss of the tax credit has driven SolarCity and others to focus on cutting their project development and construction costs. The goal is to make the price of solar electricity on par with power from coal or natural gas power plants without the hefty government incentive. Reaching that goal will allow solar companies to continue to tell consumers that they could end up paying less for electricity over time if they go solar. It also will entice more business and utility customers to sign up.

Reducing manufacturing and project development and construction costs is also critical for First Solar to stay competitive. For several years now, the company has also been focusing on winning customers in emerging markets, such as India and, more recently, Chile. Earlier this week, it announced the groundbreaking of a 46-megawatt project in the United Kingdom.

The company has previously fumbled in its international expansion. Its effort to build 2 gigawatts of power projects in China’s Inner Mongolia was declared dead earlier this year.

Hughes said he recently hired a new manager to work on developing the Chinese market. But China will not be a priority in the near term partly because profits tend to be thin for projects there.

While First Solar plans to boost production to meet anticipated demand, it’s being cautious about firing up too many assembly lines to contribute to another glut in the market.

“There’s quite a lot of capacity being added in the marketplace right now,” Hughes said. “You’ll continue to see a bit of imbalance of supply and demand. We are cautious about not heading into another period of excess capacity.”

In new data provided by the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 31,000 global respondents, 68 percent of respondents trust the “renewables” business to do the right thing, as compared with 58 percent for natural gas, 53 percent for utilities and 49 percent for oil (see image below).

That’s a license to lead, folks. Despite significant perceptual headwinds, renewables emerge with a 10 point lead over its nearest energy competitor. As a marketer, I’m reminded of why I originally found this sector so energizing and inspiring during the cleantech boom of 2007-2008.

Note the high trust in places like China and India. Not surprising, considering the clear messages sent by those governments about cleantech deployment, and the ability of those nations to leapfrog traditional energy systems to meet electricity demand for growing middle classes. Both countries boast cleantech leaders like Hanwha Solar, Suzlon and Tata.

Note the low numbers for Japan (66 percent) and Germany (63 percent). These are consistent with both countries’ lower trust in business and energy.

The German numbers shocked me the first time I saw them. But for this country, renewables have graduated to the “big energy” establishment, which I expect engenders less trust than the sheen of new technologies in emerging markets.

For Japan, trust in the entire energy industry is lower than other countries post-Fukushima, but renewables are trusted most within the Japanese energy sector.

Broadening focus to the entire energy industry, this data corroborates another trend: so-called “purpose-driven” energy innovators enjoy a trust premium over other energy professionals. This not just a cleantech thing, it’s an advanced energy thing. This is for two reasons:

When asked to rank attributes that shape trust in a company, respondents ranked “purpose” – protecting the environment, partnering with NGOs – as most important, and being an “innovator of new products” close behind (see image below and note the orange and purple attributes that respondents rank as more important for the energy industry as compared with general business).

On the flipside, communicating about the success of business “operations” (dark blue) was valued only as table stakes for being an energy company, not as a major trust-builder. I would argue this is true if we’re talking about large companies, but I think the opposite is true for advanced energy start-ups where the onus is much higher to prove operational success.

The data also shows how technology is trusted more than energy. In my opinion, the marriage of technology and energy is a net gain for energy company trust building. See the image below, which depicts how much higher technology is trusted than energy (78 percent vs. 67 percent). I interpret this as further proof that innovation gives the energy industry license to lead.

This is reflected in the strong Silver Spring IPO on Wednesday. Silver Spring is an innovative energy IT company, not just an energy company. Energy IT is a highly credible sector populated by other promising companies like OPOWER and FirstFuel, and a primary focus for venture capitalist still focused on cleantech. The public trust data corroborates the investor enthusiasm.

]]>Earlier this week solar startup GreenVolts told me that it had lost a major investment from power company ABB and as a result laid off more than 60 of its 80 employees, and is now looking for a buyer. Greentech Media first reported the troubles from the startup.

You’re probably wondering, so what happened? ABB was previously the lead investor in GreenVolts’ latest round and had committed $20 million of the $35 million round. Andrew Tang, ABB’s Managing Director of its venture arm, ABB Technology Ventures, gave me some more context for why ABB decided not to continue to fund the company:

Our decision to not further invest in GV has nothing to do with its team or technology, in fact both of which are recognized as world class. This decision reflects the uncertainty in the PV market, and the lack of transparency on when it will stabilize. I hope this decision demonstrates that we are a disciplined investor, who won’t sell winners too early, nor throw good money after bad. We are optimistic about the industrial and cleantech space, and ABB Technology Ventures will continue to seek and make financially sound investments in innovative start-up companies which have technologies or business model of strategic interest to ABB. In fact, we currently have an active global pipeline and evaluate more than 1,000 deals a year.

]]>Walmart’s massive scale allows it to dominate a lot of sectors it enters — turns out the retailer is also a behemoth in solar panel power. According to a list of the top 20 companies in the U.S. using solar panel systems, released by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) on Wednesday, Walmart comes out on top for both how much solar power its stores are generating as well as how many individual systems it’s installed.

Other major U.S. solar customers include Costco, Kohl’s, Walgreens, IKEA, and Macy’s. It’s not surprising that the companies that have a lot of department and grocery stores — with large roof space — would have the most opportunity for installing solar panel systems. According to the report there’s 2.3 GW of solar panel systems installed, delivering over 24,000 systems, for companies and governments (non-residential). In comparison 1 GW is the size of a large coal or nuclear plant.

Remember these are already installed systems. Other companies have sizable plans in the works. For example, Apple is building a 20 MW system in North Carolina for its data center.

As I reported yesterday, the trends behind this interest by companies in solar panels is due to rock bottom solar panel prices, policies in some key states, like California, Arizona, and New Jersey, and also new business models for financing solar panel systems. Companies like SolarCity have created businesses around raising money from investors like banks (or even Google) to finance the upfront cost of a solar panel system. SolarCity’s customer can then pay for the solar system over a 20-year, or so, time frame (which is more convenient and affordable), and the bank can get back a return on that investment (like 12 percent).

However, according to the report released on Tuesday about the growth of solar panel systems in the U.S., this rapid adoption is expected to slow down in the second half of this year and next year.

This year 3.2 GW of solar panels projects are estimated to be installed, which includes both utility-scale solar panel projects, and solar panels installed on rooftops for homes and businesses. Utility-scale solar projects — like the kind that SunPower and PG&E announced last week — made up more than half of the quarter’s installations, at 447 MW and with 20 projects completed. It was the largest quarter ever for utility solar panel installations, says the report.

The trends behind this solar panel wave in the U.S. are rock bottom solar panel prices, and policies in some key states, like California, Arizona, and New Jersey. However, the report authors estimate that the growth in U.S. solar panel installations will slow down in the second half of this year and next year.

There’s already a sizable amount of solar capacity in California. According to the New York Times blog Green, in August California’s utility solar power projects generated about 1 GW during a peak time, which is about as big as a large coal of nuclear plant. And there’s 5.16 GW of solar panel power spread across close to 250,000 solar panel systems total in the U.S.

Beyond the bright spot of solar panel installations, much of the U.S. solar industry that does manufacturing is really struggling. The industry is gathering this week in Orlando for the huge solar convention Solar Power International and will no doubt address the concerns, as well as the bright spots.